Call of Duty: Infinite Mediocrity

The recent announcement for the latest entry in the Call of Duty series has got me thinking. I don’t want to add my hatred to the already no doubt massive negative response garnered by any annual CoD release; I just want to get a few points out there that I think are important.

I watched the trailer and being brutally honest, for 2 minutes and 58 seconds I could only describe my feelings as varying degrees of “mehhh”.The aesthetics, whilst not being too important to me, were very samey and unimpressive. The story, or at least the snippets we got, was very reminiscent of another not massively successful game *cough* Titanfall *cough*. So I was left asking a question: Who really wants another Call of Duty game? The answer? The corporate bigwigs who love to stuff their britches with all of our hard-earned cash.

However, the conundrum presented itself around 24 hours after the trailer was revealed. Following a wave of negative responses the trailer itself on the Call of Duty YouTube channel currently sits at a whopping 1,192,254 dislikes to just 259,602 likes. Never in the history of gaming has something been so massively panned and never have so many dislikes been applied to a video. It has been argued that this is simply the work of lobbyists who wanted to get the video the most dislikes on YouTube to just be dicks, but acting on the fairly reasonable assumption that a great many of said dislikes were sincere, Activisionnow faces a pretty huge money-shaped problem. What do they do now? What should they do now? Alluding to my earlier comment I stated that I didn't really think much of 2 minutes and 58 seconds of the reveal trailer but “the trailer is 3 minutes and 24 seconds long?” I hear you cry! And indeed you are correct. The announcement of the remastered edition of the original Modern Warfare sent me into a quivering ecstasy of nostalgia, so many things for Jackson to do in glorious HD. I am definitely excited for that but, as I said, it got me thinking. Activision, at least for now, are shipping the remastered CoD 4 ONLY with the “Legacy Edition” of Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare and even though it comes out at a hefty £79.99 (£80 to us normies) a small part of my young teenage brain was saying “It’s worth it, think about all the juicy multiplayer maps” but another, admittedly smaller, part of my brain was saying “Are they seriously doing this HD remake to make more people buy their latest garbage?” and so here it is.

Infinite Warfare will be released later this year.

Activision can go a few ways with this; They COULD cut their losses and make up some money by flogging the remastered CoD 4 on its own (I would certainly buy it), they could offer the remaster with EVERY purchase of Infinite Warfare and do something more with the legacy edition to entice people in OR they could just do what I expect them to do which is ultimately nothing. It seems to me that they know damn well that people are growing tired of their bullshit and a bunch of execs got together and thought “Ya know what, let’s play on people's nostalgia and give them a game they might actually want alongside or regular garbage. THAT will guarantee sales”. The saddest thing is that they appear to KNOW that they can only make a profit by tagging something onto the base game! The true irony is that they have a reworked version of what is, in my opinion, the ONLY Call Of Duty game to get almost everything right and attached it to an unadulterated disaster that has completely forgotten what made it great in the first place.

It saddens me to see this happening year after year. In a world where relatively samey shooters flourish and make millions and hardworking indie devs who pour their hearts, their money and their lives into making truly different games often get scuppered before they start. We must all remember that the consumer is a powerful weapon. If we all come together and make enough racket, we can change the landscape of gaming.

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